WEBSTER'S THEATRE LANGUAGE
Action, imagery and characterisation in THE DUCHESS OF MALFI incoporate contrasts, parallels, paradoxes and inversions of the norm. The brothers who should love the Duchess are her most cruel enemies; the husband who should hive her strength has to take courage from her example.
The most complicated presentation of the conflict between appearance and reality is found in Bosola, in whom it is made visible through his use of disguise, though that is less important than the invisible disguising of his true nature at the beginning of the play and his conversion after the Duchess's murder, at the end.
The death of the Duchess suggests that the darkness of evil extinguishes the light of good, but thereby liberates the good, fair soul from its cage and paper prison into the light of eternity. It is Bosola, who left in this 'sensible hell' where, despite conversion, he is unable to prevent himself from killing the goodness which is represented by Antonio.
Themes of THE WHITE DEVIL are echoed in Webster's later tragedy, indicating his continuing concern with the corruption of princely courts and of great men. Both tragedies provide, through their action,an opportunity for us to ponder on the different ways in which men and women face death.
The fabric of Webster's verse is densely woven. The large number of critical articles on different aspects of the play testifies to the impossibility of his meaning being fully apprehended by a single experience of the play, whether in the theatre or the study. Like Shakespeare's, his images are not inert, but are reflected in action. Some indeed, are based on the combined impact of picture and verse in Rennaissance emblem books. In 1970, Inga-Stina Ewbank considered Webster's dramatic art in terms of Rennaissance perspective painting. More recently, his use of an emblematic technique has been studied.
Webster's themes and images are inseperable from his sources, upon which RW Dent's impressive study of 'John Webster's Borrowing' sheds necessary light. Knowledge of the extent to which Webster's verse is indepted to plays variations on other men's ideas and phrases allows us to appreciate what kind of mind he had and gives added resonance to the speeches through which his characters live. We do not go to the theatre to spot Webster's sources but we may profit from an understanding of which authors influenced him.
In both theatre and study one is made aware of this nightmare quality by Webster's juxtaposition of opposites in theme - appearance and reality, light and dark, love and death - and in character. Recent critics like Jacqueline Pearson and Lee Bliss have given Webster credit for knowing what he was about and for being in symphathy with the dramatic experiments of his contemporaries.
In Jacobean cast lists, as in life, the men took precedence, but it is surprising to find Bosola's name at the top. In the play, he is introduced to us before either of the Aragonian brothers and in critical analyses often commands more attention than the Duchess herself: a fact which the length of his part and his contemptus mundi make, perhaps unsurprisingly through Lee Bliss neatly characterises him as 'lacking the courage of his own aphorisms'.
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